I’m often asked how I come up with the new designs for various lace shawls. As I’m sure you can imagine, the process is a little bit different every time.
This particular shawl began with some yarn. 
Last year when I visited the Sanguine Gryphon at her fabulous dye camp, I dyed some Little Traveller yarn in shades of red and black. I was really pleased with how it turned out (and amazingly it’s a little bit similar to a couple of her official colourways – The Middle of Nowhere and Rojas). I’ve always meant to use this for a lace shawl, but I hadn’t quite figured out what the theme should be. So it’s been sitting in my stash since last May, just waiting for the right design.
In March, and then again in April the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted on Iceland. And on the news we saw spectacular pictures of the volcano, the lava, and (of course) the ash-clouds that are still disrupting air traffic occasionally. And whatever else the erupting volcano might be, some of those pictures were truly amazing, and my imagination started running wild with fires and streams of lava.
And then the Little Traveller yarn caught my eye again, and seemed to look just like the smouldering lava that had been forming in my imagination. Naturally this shawl had to be a circular shawl, so that the lava could start in the centre and work its way out.
As with all hand-dyed yarn, I had only a limited amount of yarn, with no possibility of getting more yarn to match, so it’s been important to me to use it as efficiently as possible. After finishing the first skein, I calculated how many more rounds I would get out of the second skein, and (with a small margin) designed the pattern to extend as far as possible.
The shawl should be ready in the next few days – I just have to work the edging and then of course block it. Blocking always works wonders on lace, and particularly on shawls knit in the round. During the actual knitting the shawl is so bunched up on the needles that it’s hard to see the pattern develop, and that makes the blocking transformation even more amazing.
